So here’s what we think (in no particular order) are some of the things that we might be able to do with Write to Reply:

Provide a convenient and innovative site for members of the public to re-publish public documents for detailed, structured comment.

Provide a convenient and innovative site for authors of public documents to re-publish their work for detailed, structured comment.

Provide a variety of methods for comments to be syndicated to the authors of the documents with reference to the section and paragraph that the comment refers to.

Provide a variety of methods for comments to be syndicatedto anyone with reference to the section and paragraph that the comment refers to. Feed comments into your newsreader, your web site or your very own mashup.

Allow ‘re-publishers’ and authors to analyse how their report is being accessed on the site (i.e. we can provide Google Analytics reports for each document).

Provide a version of the report that allows other people to use unique URIs to “deep-link” to individual sections, figures, tables and paragraphs within the report.

Provide a way of seeing who’s linking to each section, figure, table or paragraph within the report from other websites.

Help promote the public scrutiny of and commentary on public documents.

Run a site built around the freely available WordPress platform, one of the most popular and extensible open source web publishing platforms around. (With over 4000 plugins, WordPress actively follows the cutting edge of web publishing). For anyone who wants to host their own version of Write to Reply, we’ll be able to show you how…

Those are our initial ideas, but what about yours? Join us on the Write to Reply wiki where we’re starting to pull our ideas together. We’re keen to discuss (with whoever’s interested!) what you think the potential of the service might be. We also hope this project grows too big for just the two of us to manage in our spare time, which means there could well be opportunities for volunteering your own time on the project 😉

Finally, if you’re interested in some of the web analytics for our Digital Britain – Interim Report launch, hop over to Flickr, where we’ll be posting screenshots of some of the stats until commenting drops off. (We’ll also look at ways of publishing the stats as raw data with interactive charting tools that anyone can use).

If Lord Carter and his team want access to the full site analytics, they’re very welcome to them.